Biomarkers for Huntington's Disease

Elizabeth A. Thomas, Ph.D.Elizabeth A. Thomas received her Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of California (UC), Berkeley in 1989, and then studied at the UC Irvine, School of Medicine, receiving her Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1994. International appointments include time as an Adjunct Research Officer at the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, followed by an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental, Health, also in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently the laboratory director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research at UC Irvine, and also holds positions of Research Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Human Behavior at UC Irvine, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the S^100 peer-reviewed publications to date, and her work has appeared in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cell Stem Cell, Human Molecular Genetics, Biological Psychiatry and Molecular Psychiatry.Georgia M. Parkin, Ph.D.Georgia M. Parkin received her Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2011, her Master’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2014, and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2019. Her work has spanned the fields of traumatic brain injury, psychiatric illness with a focus on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and Huntington’s disease. Dr. Parkin is academically trained in laboratory-based research, with her past studies focusing on cell culture and mouse models, as well as human subjects and clinical patients, and involving biospecimens such as post-mortem brain tissue, blood, saliva and cerebrospinal fluid. Concurrent to, and following, completion of her Ph.D., Dr.Parkin has also specialized in clinical biomarker research, through appointments at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience Research at University of California, Irvine. She currently works in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego, and is part of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America Center of Excellence at this site. Her published work has been featured in journals including Nature Neuroscience, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Bipolar Disorders, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, among others; her research has also been shared by multiple news sites.

• Molecular Biomarkers.Somatic instability/Telomeres,- Genetic modifiers.-  Current clinical trial biomarkers.-Pharmacodynamic biomarkers for Htt-lowering therapeutics.-Inflammatory biomarkers.-Sleep dysregulation markers.-Mitochondrial/Oxidative stress biomarkers.-Microbiomics.- Metabolomics.-Proteomics.-Transcriptomics.-Lipidomics.-Imaging marker overview.-Retinal imaging biomarkers.-  MRI - non-invasive functional MRI measures.- The evolution of clinical trial methodology.-Digital biomarkers.- The future of telehealth.- Summary and future trends.